Internet Explorer 8 defaults to standards mode

Mar 4, 2008

As the title says, david has slain goliath, aka the web development community has gained such a voice that Microsoft listens. Or microsoft has adopted webstandards in such a way that they care about the voice of the community. Lets hope that it is a combination of the two.

Any way, the new default behaviour of IE 8 is to behave as IE 8

I would illustrate the importance of this decision with a bit of history of the discussion, at the bottom of this page. But first go and agree with molly and CELEBRATE

Well, it sure has been a busy month in web development land, starting on februari 22th when the IE8 team announced that the default behaviour of IE8 would be to behave as IE7. If you don't understand, I will repeat it for you more slowly this time.

Yes, you read it correctly, in order to have ie8 behave as ie8, the original idea was that you had to insert a <META HTTP-EQUIV="X-BALL-CHAIN">. Much is to say against it, as many did, but the basic reason for the IE team was (flawed) but admirable. They saw so many sites break during the transition of ie 6 to 7 that they wanted to ease the transtion. There is something to say in that the standards aware developer could easily go the extra distance to let IE 8 be a good standards compliant browser

The downside of this was that many sites would not do this and the forward movement of the web would be slowed in the least. As the majority of web developers are not well educated and aware of standards, but frontpage using *^&%$#

Needless to say, that some people were not amused in the web development community, to say the least. There were a couple of people for it, other were clearly against it, some were on the fence. I will give you a couple of responses, in case you haven't kept up with your reading the last month.